The Light of Day

Anthony Watts has posted a story about an Oregon State University instructor, Nickolas Drapela, who has been dismissed from his job. Watts hosts a lengthy piece (by Gordon Fulks) which accuses OSU of intolerance, raises the spectre of Lysenkoism, and suggests that Drapela was dismissed because “Drapela is an outspoken critic of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, the official religion of the State of Oregon, the Oregon Democratic Party, and Governor John Kitzhaber“.

I’m not sure which is greater, the pity that the scientific issue of global warming has been so politicized by those who want to prevent us from doing anything about it, or the irony that one of their strategies is to accuse others of politicizing the issue. In a move I find almost incomprehensible, Watts also linked to a slide presentation by Drapela. It’s astounding.

What’s astounding is that it’s little more than a diatribe, accusing those who warn against the danger of global warming of perpetrating conspiracy and fraud for money and power. In my opinion, it might be the most paranoid such presentation I’ve ever seen. Drapela further accuses believers in man-made global warming of politicizing the issue, which really amounts to Drapela himself politicizing the issue.

What’s missing from Drapela’s slide show is anything like science, except for two of the last three slides. The 3rd-to-last simply states:

To support this idea we get the 2nd-to-last slide:

I was struck by this, because I’ve seen something very much like it before. The same idea was promoted in Martin Durkin’s “documentary” The Great Global Warming Swindle, which includes this graph:

Note that both Drapela’s, and Durkin’s, graphs fail to give solar-cycle data beyond about 1980.

When Durkin’s documentary was shown in Australia, he was interviewed by a reporter for ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) who asked why that was. The reporter wasn’t satisfied with Durkin’s answer, so he went and got the data for himself (a good idea). The Australian reporter added more recent data, and — lo and behold!

This is the kind of nonsense we have to put up with from those who oppose doing something to deal with the global warming problem. Thoroughly refuted “theories” are regurgitated again and again, like zombies, long after they’re dead. They’re used to excuse conspiracy/fraud accusations. If proponents of this nonsense are given the dismissal which, in my opinion, they deserve, Anthony Watts and others will treat as martyrs.

Just in case you’re wondering what was on the last slide, it’s the politicization of the solar-cycle-length “theory”:

Where is he getting that last 1985 ‘Sunspot cycle length’ point from? It’s suspect. Can we verify it?

[Response: It’s probably from Friis-Christensen & Lassen, but if I recall correctly is was discovered soon after their publication that they had made an arithmetic error in their calculations of the final data point.]

Let’s not forget the tragic plight of Professor Niklaus Dracula, the geography professor dismissed from Oregon State simply for opposing the highly politicized and oppressive round-Earth theory. Here’s an excerpt from the slide presentation to his class, showing the actual shape of the Earth:

———————————

But because RoundEarthism is the religion of the Geology Department, OSU, the state of Oregon, the USA, the World, and anyone with half a brain, Dracula was heartlessly hounded from his position, forced to give up the coffin with a bit of earth from his grave which he used as an office at OSU, and banned from sucking his students’ blood!

How very like Lysenko, Goebbels, the Spanish Inquisition, and Darth Vader. Don’t you think?

Point being that instructors are hired on fixed-term contracts, with renewal not guaranteed. Particularly during times like these:

The Oregon University System will see an 11 percent cut in state support over the next two years after final passage of its budget bill in the Legislature today.

The Oregon House voted 43-15 to approve a $709 million in state general fund and lottery money for the state’s seven public universities for 2011-13. That marks the third biennial decrease in a row for the university system, bringing its state funding to a level lower in actual dollars than it received a decade ago.

11% cut over the university system in the current two years after two biennial decreases in a row … the cuts have to come from somewhere, and while the universities have tried to minimize the number of faculty cut, you can’t squeeze forever without shedding headcount.

Of course, if one’s fighting for one’s job in tight economic times one might consider not being a total ass teaching anti-science spin on climate science in a *general chemistry class*.

Now lemme git this straight. Wattless thinks it’s a grave injustice for a state university to fire Drapela ‘because of his views on climate change’ (even if it really is for budget reasons/lack of money). On the other hand, LowWatt rails that James and Gavin SHOULD be dismissed from NASA because of…’their views on climate change.’ That about right? His are the nonsensical ravings of a SciFi blog operator desperately doing anything to keep the money flowing from his Web biz. In the words of a much more coherent Monty Python, “Is your name not Bruce?” “No, it’s Michael.” “That’s going to cause a little confusion.” “Mind if we call you “Bruce” to keep it clear?” Howls of derisive laughter.

The WUWT post mainly comprises two e-mails from Drapela giving his explaination for his sacking. It all sounds rather strange to me, him having to be “lured into the chair’s office” to be sacked.
I don’t know about the US but in the UK, with no severance pay, no notice & no reason given, his sacking (as he describes it) would be a blatant case of ‘unfair dismissal’.
As for his denialist views, they (& the “research” he did in the area) appear exceedngly childish stuff, as his website shows.http://chemistry.oregonstate.edu/~drapelan/Climate%20Change.htm

What I felt most bizarre in his e-mails was this paragraph:-
“I should say that they regularly read all my email communications, which is why I am writing from this private email address. That has been going on for quite some time now.”
Perhaps this intimates that he has yet to grasp the real root of his problems.

His website on climate change is priceless. The “Is the earth warming?” section is especially appalling. I notice he links to WUWT images.

Quite clearly this guy has been weaned on WUWT and similar blogs and has a grossly exaggerated opinion of his competence on the climate issue.

In the “solar forcing” section he cites Lassen 91 again: “Eijil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen discovered that the sunspot cycle length is inversely related to the earth’s temperature in a remarkably well-correlated fashion. As solar cycles get closer together, the earth warms. As they lengthen and get farther apart, the earth cools.”

Then the startling part: “In multiple papers (see Scientific Literature), this effect has been confirmed over and over again since 1991. Certainly no one can dispute the correlation…”

I was weaned on Creationists. The similarity in style between Creationists and Global warming denialists is telling..

* Devoted to disproving a hated theory? Check
* No interest in science other than disproving aforesaid theory? Check.
* Happy to advance mutually contradictory arguments? Check.
* Rubber-duck like ability to ignore smackdowns? Check
* Focus on a small number of hated individuals instead of the scientific picture? Check
* Hypersensitive to any mild ad-hom, however justified, whilst dishing out heaps of abuse up to and including death threats? Check
* Utterly unable to scientifically describe the theory that they are convinced is wrong? Check
* Unable to separate out the theory under discussion from their imagined social/political consequences of that theory being true. Check.

It can be very hard to grasp the mentality involved, especially if you have a basically scientific/empirical education and outlook.

You left out:
* Advocate “teaching the alternative” in public schools, so students “can make up their own minds”
* Unable to provide a clear description, in scientific terms, of said “alternative theory” – beyond sniping at perceived “failures” of the real science
* attempting to enact legislation to prevent teaching of the science, unless accompanied by “the alternative”
* labeling the scientific viewpoint as “just another religion”
* labeling the science as an attempt to deny the authority of “God”.

To be fair, I think that there is a difference in some ways.Creationists generally want an alternative reality presented (basically, ‘Goddidit’), and presented as proof of their holy book. Whereas global warming denialists want the whole subject closed down, basically; essentially it’s about roping off a section of human knowledge with police ‘Do Not Cross’ tape.

@Alex the Seal:
“The bottom line is that he was likely fired because he’s a bad scientist. That much is pretty obvious.”

Actually, he wasn’t a scientist at all.

He claims that his research group is working on synthesis of sequoiatone. he ahs been at OSU 10 years. His publication history, from his page on the OSU web site, shows exactly one paper published in 2000, before he came to OSU, on a different topic.

As my advisor used to say, if you don’t publish it, you didn’t do it. Drapela has a 12 year history of having done no science.

So, an adjunct instructor, taking lab space with zero productivity, with a history of demonizing science with badly sourced and false arguments, gets let go in a dismal economic climate with known major funding cuts.

An instructor in the Oregon university system isn’t [necessarily?] expected to do research, they’re expected to teach. They often don’t have PhDs (I know a stats instructor at Portland State University, who has a masters, who has no research component to her job, but apparently is thought highly *as an instructor* by both students and fellow faculty).

If he published a paper in 2000, that would’ve been during one of his “Assistant Professor” gigs, where research would be important to going up the ladder, vs. stepping down, which I should think most people would consider “Instructor” to be.

Maybe it’s that level of productivity – one paper in four years of being an Assistant Professor – that caused him to be hired as an Instructor at OSU.

And maybe after a decade of being an instructor, in times of very tight financing, they felt that letting him go was less injurious to the department than letting someone less whacky and with better prospects go …

Judging by the opening of the slideshow about how victimised fake sceptics are, it seems to me Drapela was probaby angling to get fired (or at the very least, reprimanded) so he could be a matyr for their cause and claimed that Al Gore was silencing him with his three hundred million dollar campaign.

However, I do concede that slide 69 is perhaps the greatest slide of all time.

(Fulks tried the “models only fit past climate due to fitting via excessive number of parameters”, but conspicuously (thus far) has failed to take up my challenge to tweak any model of his choosing to fit past climate and generate significantly different predictions for future climate. No Nobel Prize for you!)

I don’t have time right now to compare Rutan and Drapela’s slides – anyone want to bet on significant similarities?

Fulks is a very visible presence in the Oregon climate science denialist scene (easy to be visible since that community’s so small). A (retired?) physicist who semi-periodically trots out the same old denialist bullshit (“sun! climategate! models!”) we’re all used to in Op-Eds published by the Oregonian. He gets a contrarian piece in just about any time the Oregonian prints an editorial about climate change, or a news piece about new, supporting, science, etc. In other words he fills the role of providing “false balance” via Op-Eds that I suspect are often solicited by the paper.

Note that in the comments he complains that The Oregonian watered down his piece, editing phrases such as “the guilty of Climategate” to “the scientists of Climategate” and other sins against the denialist’s alternative reality.

Kevin KcKinney. I beg to differ.
If someone is consistently wrong, like this Gordon Fulks character is in this OrigonLive.com item where he misrepresents () Recent global temperature change, () What is driving such temperature change, () Sea-level change, Arctic meltdown, () Atmospheric CO2 levels; in truth, everything he presents is wrong; if somebody is consistently so wrong, can they be an ignoramus, a person who knows nothing? Surely the true ignoramus who expresses an opinion will on occasion be correct simply through chance.. This Gordon Fulks is never correct so he cannot be an ignoramus. He is a blithering idiot of some other stripe.

David Hilbert said:
“We must not believe those, who today, with philosophical bearing and deliberative tone, prophesy the fall of culture and accept the ignorabimus. For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science. In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus our slogan shall be:
We must know — we will know!”https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Hilbert

So you approve the victimization of a science teacher for proposing a hypothesis in regard to AGW different from the one you propose. Thank you. The policing of the “consensus” has been explained.

[Response: Hilarious!

I don’t approve the “victimization” of anyone — you just made that up so you and your buddies can pretend to be martyrs. That’s a recurrent theme with fake skeptics — when their “science” is shown to be ridiculous they complain about being ridiculed. Then they howl about persecution, all the while accusing legitimate scientists of fraud, corruption, and conspiracy. That stench is “hypocrisy.”

I do approve the dismissal of a science teacher who teaches falsehoods as though they were science, while pushing a political agenda by hurling venomous accusations at the climate science community.]

The humour never stops at WUWT. Today someone called “Just the facts” has a long post claiming a story in The Economist on Arctic warming is wrong to place the blame on AGW. If JTF had read the “special report” the article links to he(?) would have seen his questions answered.

Unbelievably, Tom Harris has shown up in the comment stream of the Daily Caller article covering Drapela to . . . wait for it . . . clear up misinformation swirling about the web regarding Drapela’s firing for opposing the theory of AGW. I can’t find a way to link directly to the thread, but I am seriously tempted to make a snide comment and link to Tamino’s Harris post.